The US government has been running a quantum Internet for over two years

It’s a perfectly secure Internet that by definition cannot be penetrated by wiretaps and eavesdropping — and the US government has been sitting on it for the last two-and-a-half years.

A longtime goal among cryptologists has been to perfect the
“quantum Internet” — which, in the most basic way possible, uses
the main principle of quantum mechanics to transfer communications
from one point to another.

Still confused? Technology Review explained it as easily as
possible:

“The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum
object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to
eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs
of snooping that the receiver can detect.”

Makes sense, right? Well it’s much easier said than done and has
been a desire of computer scientists and cryptologists since the
early days of the Internet. A quantum Internet connection cannot be
even remotely disturbed without raising a red flag, so data sent
over such a network would be transmitted in the most secure form
the digital age has ever seen.

“And these are literally completely secure,” wrote Dan
Nosowitz for PopSci this week. “Any attempt to eavesdrop is
necessarily obvious, because the mere act of eavesdropping
physically changes the transmission.”

According to a revelation made by two scientists this week, the
era of quantum Internet may finally be upon us.

The Tech Review blog announced on Monday that Richard Hughes and
a team of researchers at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico
have been running an “alternative quantum Internet,” and
have been doing so for roughly two-and-a-half years. In a blog post
the website broke down the basics of how Hughes and company created
a system that works like a hub-and-spoke network in which all
messages anywhere in the network get routed from a main node — a
central hub.

“The idea is that messages to the hub rely on the usual level
of quantum security. However, once at the hub, they are converted
to conventional classical bits and then reconverted into quantum
bits to be sent on the second leg of their journey,” announced
the blog. “So as long as the hub is secure, then the network
should also be secure.”

The government’s labs at Los Alamos have previously been used
for nuclear research and were instrumental in the Manhattan Project
— the Allied forces program that evoked the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. According to Tech Review, though, the goal of having
a commercially viable quantum Internet is one much less intense.
The website reported that a quantum connection could be used to
establish 100 percent secure connections using fiber cables between
home computers, televisions and other objects as seemingly
everything can be wired these days to the Internet.

Given recent attempts out of Washington to
essentially eliminate encryption, though, selling a super secure
connection to the American public is likely a long way coming.